My Aims As An Actress

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 136, 11 June 1938, Page 7 (Supplement)

My Aims As An Actress

By Merle Oberon

WHEN I first went into pictures I hoped I tvas going to be able to do what no woman has done to play all sorts of different roles and have a new personality for each one. Charles Laughton and Paul Muni have done it, but no woman ever has; and that's what I was trying to do when I played Spanish, Japanese and French women in my early pictures.

Xow, I realise it isn't possible. For me thing, the public won't let you. Once you have any success ae a pertonality they resent any attempt to be different. Fox another, I've come to realise that it's true that your own individuality will always come through in the end, and if jyou're going to be a success on the screen you've got to use it * v After all m se.M and done, the one thing an actrese has .for the screen ie her own feeling—the vthing that comes out somehow from inside you. That, in the last analysis, is the secret of film •cting. Alexander Korda is the man I must credit for the growth and development of what I might term my motionpicture viewpoint. For, Mr. Korda not only gave me my first chance when he enrolled me for the oast of "The Private Life of Henry VITt.," but he acted «6 an invaluable mentor in all my succeeding pictures. You see, Mr. Korda, in his analytical way, perceived what I •lways thought was my own. deep, dark eecret.

He guessed that I was afraid of tryIng something new and that I didn't really want to go on playing exotic parts —but merely that I had a fierce inferiority complex in those daye. The truth M I couldn't imagine anybody being interested in seeing me, ae myself. It ■was almost habit with me to cover my face with ell kinds of strange makeup to look diflfereit>, The producer coneluded that the >isest course was to let me grow out of my problem naturally. Thus, when I went to Hollywood and played in Samuel Goldwyn's "The Dark Angel' , and it proved a success, I readily abandoned every theory I had ever cherished and decided that 'henceforth I would never oling to hard-and-fast rules. And so, when after a five-year sojourn on "The Coast" I returned to t.ie Korda studios to appear in "The Divorce of Lady X," I didn't have any mental tremors because this picture was going to mark my Technicolour debut and to

launch me in my first comedy role. I might say, with perdoimble pride, that I took it all in stride. Playing before the colour cameras ie a vastly exciting experience. Because the chromatic lene requires only a mini-

mum of makeup, one .cannot help feeling that the last vestiges of artificiality have disappeared and that the, school of absolutely natural acting has really come into its own. As for my appearing as a comedienne for the first time on the ecreen, I can only hope that my public will approve. Truthfully, I felt every inch equal to the role even though it was a "first." But if in the future I should be called upon to again impersonate a villainees, I hope that moviegoers will see beyond the fictional character, and give me credit for being what I have always been —a modern, quite ordinary young woman upon whom the Fetes have smiled very liberally.